The clinical evaluation in chronic schizophrenic patients of new antipsychotic compounds will continue to be our primary focus. The procedures developed at this unit for assessing extrapyramidal side effects are particularly valuable now that the first compounds presumably without such effects are being examined. The evaluation of new longacting neuroleptics is another area of interest for the upcoming year. We now have workable methods for measuring the levels of several neuroleptics in the blood and are working on methods for several other drugs. These methods will enable us to examine possible relationships among kinetic and steady state measures, dosage, side effects and therapeutic response. It is hoped that the explication of these relationships will ultimately lead to more rational treatment methods. More specifically, it may be possible to develop a procedure whereby a patient's clinical response to a drug may be predicted on the basis of pre-treatment kinetic measures. Blood level studies of long-acting drugs may be useful in determining the length of activity of an administration for any patient, along with the likelihood of side effects. This is another area we intend to examine. Finally, we plan to continue our investigations of extrapyramidal side effects and plan a controlled study of L-Dopa in this area.